Perry continues to deny role in Cain story

Texas Gov. Rick Perry continued to deny on Thursday that his campaign had anything to do with planting a story about alleged sexual harassment by Herman Cain, a Perry rival for the Republican presidential nomination. Cain, meanwhile, continued to blame the Perry camp, even as his campaign manager seemed to back away from his earlier Perry allegations.

Perry told CNN's John King Thursday night that he would not allow people on his campaign to spread such rumors.

"If you're passing on rumors that are that heinous and that bad, you don't need to be working with me - gone," Perry said.

'Trying to help' Perry

Cain was not persuaded. Appearing Thursday on conservative talk radio host Sean Hannity's show, Cain denied accusations from a Perry pollster, Chris Wilson, who told an Oklahoma City radio station Wednesday that he saw Cain harass a woman at a Washington-area restaurant in the late 1990s, when the candidate was CEO of the National Restaurant Association.

"This Chris Wilson guy is just trying to help out the Perry campaign," Cain told Hannity.

On Wednesday, Cain's campaign manager, Mark Block, accused Perry campaign consultant Curt Anderson of feeding the story to Politico, which ran the story last Sunday night. Anderson, who worked with Cain on his unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign in 2004, denied he was the source of the story, as did Wilson.

On a Fox News appearance at noon Thursday, Block said he took Anderson at his word.

More Information

CAIN-TROVERSY

Other developments regarding the allegations against GOP candidate Herman Cain:

Board told?: Politico reported that one woman's complaints about Cain's advances at a restaurant association event were shared with at least two board members and prompted an investigation by Peter Kilgore, the general counsel for the association. Kilgore, who still serves as general counsel, has not commented. Politico also reported that a second female employee who had accused Cain of sexual harassment had received a severance of $45,000. The first woman was given a severance of $35,000.

Request sent: Joel Bennett, the lawyer for one of the accusers, said he sent a request to the restaurant association's lawyer to free his client from her confidentiality agreement.

FROM WIRE REPORTS

"Until we get all the facts, I'm just going to say that we accept what Mr. Anderson had said, and we want to move on with the campaign," he said.

The Cain campaign was finding it difficult to move on, because the story -and Cain's recollections - have continued to evolve since Sunday night. The former Godfather's Pizza executive and motivational speaker initially said he did not recall being charged with sexual harassment, but subsequently acknowledged that he had known of at least one of them.

Three women now have come forward with allegations about his behavior while with the restaurant association. None of the women has been named.

The Perry camp has denied that anyone associated with the campaign planted the story with Politico. Campaign spokesman Ray Sullivan suggested that the Romney campaign was responsible; a Romney spokesman denied it.

Despite the Perry denial, Texans familiar with the governor's aggressive campaigns in his statewide races could see how Cain's charge could be true.

"The thing that scares me to death is, we know firsthand the kinds of dirty tricks that the Perry folks are likely to pull at the end," said Tom "Smitty" Smith, Texas director of Public Citizen. "He'll probably come up with Obama's 'real' birth certificate in Kenya or someplace like that."

Perry and his chief political strategist, Dave Carney, have earned reputations for waging no-holds-barred campaigns.

Translator

To read this article in one of Houston's most-spoken languages, click on the button below.

"In more than half his races he's accused his opponent of being complicit in murder," said Democratic strategist Jason Stanford, who's co-writing a book about Perry.

Aggressive tactics

In his 2002 race against Democrat Tony Sanchez, Perry ran an ad that linked the wealthy Laredo businessman to the 1985 murder of Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena. In his 2010 race against former Houston Mayor Bill White, he ran an ad implying that White's so-called "sanctuary city" policy was responsible for the death of a Houston police officer.

Houston-based public relations consultant Margaret Justus, who served as a press secretary for former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, said she considered the question of who squealed on Cain to be irrelevant.

"It circumvents the real issue of whether Herman Cain sexually harassed women," Justus said. "As a woman who has worked in political campaigns, it's offensive to me that he, perhaps, got away with it and people were either paid off or cut a deal."